Just in from nature photographer Neal Maine.

Image title: Heron Magic. Signed, matted and framed. Proceeds in support of NCLC.

Within walking distance of downtown Seaside, herons perform a courtship dance high above the ground and in severe wind and rain weather.

“Nature will always find a way.”–Neal Maine

Published on April 14, 2016
The Daily Astorian: excerpts from an editorial.

As the near-record 2015–16 El Niño continues to diminish — it’s now weak to moderate — it is worth seeing if prewinter predictions and hype lived up to reality. As we now know, our local winter rainfall was impressively heavy virtually from start to finish.

Looking at the North Pacific as an enormous whole, the NOAA-West Watch blog (www.tinyurl.com/noaa-westwatch) observes El Niño did inject a lot of additional energy into the ocean system and the weather it delivered to our shores.

• Record waves battered West Coast shorelines, resulting in “approximately 45 percent more wave energy than normal hitting West Coast beaches, with about 40 percent more erosion than the average for the similar winter time frame.”

• Rough conditions slowed Columbia ship traffic in December: “Pilots suspended shipping traffic across the Columbia River Bar nearly 10 times in the month of December, among the most closures in a single month that most pilots could remember.” Conditions were much more moderate after Jan. 1, however.